Interviews

Kurt: The concept of open source software has changed the world. Our platform wouldn't exist in its current form without open source software. Every day, different components of our products run on Nginx, Node.js, Docker, MongoDB and many other open source technologies. Open source is very important to what we do.

KDE is among the biggest open source projects which continues to innovate and evolve with the changing times. Often we have seen this particular community create technologies ahead of its time which were later adopted by other projects.

What makes KDE (K Desktop Environment) different, is that it is not directly related to any major company by 'blood'. KDE is driven by community which, unlike many similar projects, has a very strong presence in the European market. It also continues to prove that community alone can create sustainable and innovative products.

Tejun Heo is a Linux kernel developer and a principal software engineer at Red Hat. In this video he takes us on a tour of his home office and answers a few questions about his work as a kernel subsystem maintainer.

"Open source is a production model. In some cases, it is a distribution model ... . You need a business model for any business that you build, but open source in itself is not that business model. Just like if you have a manufacturing branch and you use robots or you don't use robots. That is a production question, but it is not a business model for the business you are in."

Not so long ago, 30-year industry veteran Colin Garro was entrenched in the world of Microsoft. During a 14-year tenure, he was a managing consultant and public sector sales director there, ultimately ending up as national channel sales manager. Then in July 2012, Garro leapt to open source, joining Red Hat as the new director for channel sales and development

Software is the biggest reason I love FLOSS and love Fedora. I love that the software is libre and it’s nice that it’s very often gratis. On both my desktop and netbook I’m running the latest Fedora (21 at this time). On my desktop I LOVE using KDE. Its use of Activities along with Virtual Desktops helps me to organize my work so perfectly.

There are many memorable quotes attributed to Tim O’Reilly. Which isn’t surprising. He’s been talking for decades about open data, the internet and the direction technology is taking us. Like Arthur C Clarke, much of what he’s predicted, talked about and written has proven incredibly judicious. He popularised the ideas behind ‘Web 2.0’, as well as the incoming wave and impact of social media. He believes in an open government and that the internet will become a global brain of networks and things.

Sarah Novotny is a technology evangelist and community leader for NGINX. I first met her at OSCON, where she's one of the program chairs. She makes it look easy on stage, but it's a tough job to help organize one of the largest open source events held each year.

She's also a self-proclaimed geek and recently made my list of 30 community managers to follow on Twitter. At NGINX, Novotny gets to work on a project that she describes as "the secret heart of the modern web." NGINX is one of the most-used web servers and is gaining popularity, which is one of the many reasons why she's excited to be part of its growing open source community.

There is a growing concern about government surveillance. At the same time, those of us who live and breathe technology do so because it provides us with a service and freedom to share our lives with others.

There is a tacit assumption that once we leave the store, the device we have in our pocket, backpack, or desk is ours. We buy a computer, a tablet, a smartphone, and we use applications and apps without even thinking about who really owns the tools and whether we truly own any of it. You purchase a device, yet you are not free to modify it or the software on it in any way. It begs the question of who really owns the device and the software?

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and defend the rights of all free software users. FSF proudly promotes the idea of free software—not "free" as in "free beer," but "free" as in "free to modify the code, share the code, and distribute it freely."

More in Tux Machines

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

Clonezilla Live 2.4.0-7 Released to Fix a Btrfs Issue, Based on Debian Sid

Steven Shiau has released a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system aimed at system administrators who want an easy-to-use, portable, and straightforward solution for cloning disk drives.

Lumina Desktop 0.8.3 Released!

The next version of the Lumina Desktop Environment has just been released!
This is mainly a bugfix release to correct an urgent issue with the system tray on FreeBSD 11, but there are a number of other slight improvements/updates included as well. The full list of changes is included at the bottom of this announcement, but the notable changes are as follows:
New Panel Plugin: “Application Launcher“
This allows the user to pin the shortcut for an application directly to a panel.
New Utility: “lumina-xconfig“
This utility allows the user to easily enable/disable additional monitors/screens within the desktop session.
Fix the issue with transparent system tray icons on FreeBSD 11
Add support for the XDG autostart specifications.